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This paper examines the role of the annual report’s linguistic tone in predicting future firm performance in an emerging market, Vietnam.

Both manual coding approach and the naïve Bayesian algorithm are employed to determine the annual report tone, which is then used to investigate its impact on future firm performance.

The study finds that tone can predict firm performance one year ahead. The predictability of tone is strengthened for firms that have a high degree of information asymmetry. Besides, the government’s regulatory reforms on corporate disclosures enhance the predictive ability of tone.

The study suggests the naïve Bayesian algorithm as a cost-efficient alternative for human coding in textual analysis. Also, information asymmetry and regulation changes should be modeled in future research on narrative disclosures.

The study sends messages to both investors and policymakers in emerging markets. Investors should pay more attention to the tone of annual reports for improving the accuracy of future firm performance prediction. Policymakers should regularly revise and update regulations on qualitative disclosure to reduce information asymmetry.

This study enhances understanding of the annual report’s role in a non-Western country that has been under-investigated. The research also provides original evidence of the link between annual report tone and future firm performance under different information asymmetry degrees. Furthermore, this study justifies the effectiveness of the governments’ regulatory reforms on corporate disclosure in developing countries. Finally, by applying both the human coding and machine learning approach, this research contributes to the literature on textual analysis methodology.

“The world needs science, science needs women” is the message given by UNESCO in the program for the development of women in science” (UNESCO, 2017). In Vietnam, women’s participation and achievements in scientific research is considered a great and important resource for industrialization and modernization. Even so, are there gender differences in scientific achievement in the social science research institutes in Vietnam? What factors influence the scientific achievement of female social researchers? The answers will be based on data from a 2017 survey with a sample of 756 researchers, of which 77.6% were female. The survey was conducted by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, a leading, ministry-level national center for the social sciences in Vietnam. This chapter analyzed the scientific achievements of researchers through their position as principal investigators of research projects and their publications, and factors that may impact this. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of factors that may affect the scientific achievement of researchers found that gender differences in academic achievement in the social sciences in Vietnam was still prevalent. Female researchers’ scientific achievements were lower than those of their male counterparts. The contribution to science of Vietnamese female researchers was limited by many different factors; the most important were the academic rank of the researchers and gender stereotype that considered housework the responsibility of women.

The purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) through the lens of the dynamic capabilities framework. Contrary to most existing research, this study chooses a cross-national viewpoint, exploring companies operating in two emerging economies.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 80 company managers operating in eight industries in Vietnam and Bolivia. The chosen inductive analysis was supported by qualitative content analysis and data structure.

The analysis reveals 13 conceptual dimensions. For instance, sensing opportunities underlines tangible and intangible “direct prospects”, such as enhanced accuracy, speed and cost effectiveness, whereas “operational management pressures” (sensing threats) identify the dilemma of changing individuals’ mindset, recruitment and addressing financial needs. While there is an overall agreement in key dimensions, differences between managers from both countries also arise, including staff’s adaptation and constant upskilling.

Empirically, this study responds to calls for cross-national studies investigating I4.0 initiatives. In doing so, the data gathered from company managers engaged in business in emerging economies afford new perspectives, with practitioner value. Theoretically, the numerous dimensions emerging from the data analysis provide useful conceptual insights to understand managerial aspects in considering and adapting to I4.0 expectations and requirements. These insights are reinforced by the development of a conceptual model that illuminates the initiatives, efforts and challenges of embracing this phenomenon.

Most governments around the world rely heavily on tax revenue to fund not only their recurrent expenditure but also their long-term development goals. There is some evidence suggesting that tax evasion in Vietnam has, over the years, been on the rise in terms of number, scale and degree of sophistication. It may thus be beneficial to understand the extent to which various relevant psychological factors interact to influence the tax compliance of Vietnamese taxpayers. This chapter attempts to quantify the effects of taxpayer's emotion, trust and perception on their tax compliance in Vietnam. It adopts a positivist research framework, a quantitative research method and primary data collection. First, a simple, theoretical model in which emotion and trust affect tax compliance both directly and indirectly through perception as a mediating variable, is constructed. The Baron−Kenny method is then applied to the data collected from an e-survey to test various hypotheses derived from the devised theoretical model. The results show that taxpayer's perception positively and significantly influences tax compliance whereas emotion and trust exert significant and positive effects on tax compliance both directly and indirectly (via perception). The findings suggest that voluntary tax compliance in Vietnam can be improved through better tax administration services, more fiscal policy accountability and pro-active tax socialization.

Vietnam’s 11th National Party Congress prioritised integration, modernisation and industrialisation as the new key orientations for Vietnam. It outlined Vietnam’s integration with the world, not only economically, but also in terms of the social, cultural, educational, scientific and technological areas that can support social and economic development and sustainability. Vocational education has been recognised as pivotal to the nation’s sustainable workforce development and transformational changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how foreign approaches and practices have been filtered and appropriated to bring about sustainable development and transformational changes for Vietnamese vocational education.

The paper is derived from a study that involves documentary analysis, observation and semi-structured interviews with vocational learners and staff across three different vocational education and training (VET) sites in Vietnam. The overall study includes three vocational education providers and 22 participants altogether, but this paper involves observation and semi-structured interviews with eight participants, including one leader, two teachers and five students. It focusses on a Germany-funded vocational college in the northern central area of Vietnam that came under the management of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, and the local province where the college located.

The findings of the study show a critical need to develop a new “Vietnamese VET pedagogy” that filters international influences and flexibly and creatively combines them with the existing local pedagogy. To meet the local and global demands and bring transnational changes for Vietnamese vocational education, new VET pedagogies need to align with both Vietnamese historical and political situations, especially the emergent demands of the open market socialist economy and to capitalise on international influences – Confucian, French, Soviet and Western. Such a balance will ensure Vietnam makes use of both international forces and local strengths for sustainable development and transformational changes rather than passive dependence on foreign practices.

The research provides valuable insights into the appropriation of foreign practices and principles in Vietnamese vocational education. However, it focusses only on three vocational education sites in central Vietnam. Further studies with larger scale of participants and across a variety of vocational education settings including public and private institutions, community centres and family workshops will offer broader findings related to this important topic.

The study suggests practical implications for institutions to deal with the challenges associated with the adaptation of international forces into the vocational education context in Vietnam. It outlines the transformational changes in pedagogical practices related to the increased requirement to move from the traditional didactic teaching to more self-directed learning, to meet the requirements of a modern vocational education system.

This study provides unique insights into the practices and challenges of filtering foreign VET practices and principles to bring about transformational changes in Vietnamese vocational education. It, therefore, responds to the paucity of literature in this area. In addition, it examines internationalisation in Vietnamese VET, an under-researched area in the field of internationalisation of education as most of the literature in this field concentrates on the higher education sector.

Vietnam is an emerging economy in the South East Asia region. Its Generation Z is gradually taking the lead in the country. But rather than breaking away from the previous generations, this generation also shows a strong preference towards local values and solid commitment to social issues. Thus, traditional culture elements are increasingly integrated in every aspect of Generation Z’s life, such as advertising and fashion. Instead of hanging out at coffee places, they go for bubble tea. They still appreciate the traditional values but integrate them within a modern context. Brands chase after these young people by adapting their values into their products and services. In the work place, the Vietnamese Generation Z is less confident. They are partially lost in career development with poor career counselling in the education system. They desire new experience and new learning opportunities. Generation Z, who were born beginning in 1995, emerges in Vietnam as a fresh and promising force.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of internal corporate governance mechanisms, including interest alignment and control devices, on the unrelated diversification level in Vietnam. Additionally, the moderation of free cash flow (FCF) on these relationships is also tested.

The study is based on a balanced panel data set of 70 listed companies in both stock markets, Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange and Hanoi Stock Exchange, in Vietnam for the years 2007–2014, which gives 560 observations in total.

The results show that if executive ownership for CEOs is increased, then the extent of diversification is likely to be reduced. However, the link between unrelated diversification level and executive stock option, another interest alignment device, cannot be confirmed. Among three control devices (level of blockholder ownership, board composition and separation of CEO and chairman positions), the study finds a positive connection between diversification and blockholder ownership, and statistically insignificant relations between the conglomerate diversification level and board composition, or CEO duality. Additionally, this study discovers a negative link between diversification and state ownership, although there is no evidence to support the change to the effect of each internal corporate governance mechanism on the diversification level of a firm between high and low FCF.

The research can be a useful reference not only for investors and managers but also for policy makers in Vietnam. This study explores the relationship among corporate governance, diversification and firm value in Vietnam, where the topics related to effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms to public companies has been increasingly attractive to researchers since the default of Vietnam Shipbuilding Industry Group (Vinashin) happened in 2010 and the Circular No. 121/2012/TT-BTC on 26 July 2012 of the Vietnamese Ministry of Finance was issued with regulations on corporate governance applicable to listed firms in this country.

This research, first, enriches current literature on the relationship between corporate governance and firm diversification. It can be considered as a contribution to the related topic with an example of Vietnam, a developing country in Asia. Second, the research continues to prove non-unification in results showing the relationship between corporate governance and conglomerate diversification among different nations. Third, it provides a potential input for future research works on the moderation of FCF to the effects of corporate governance on diversification.

This paper studies the factors affecting digital transformation in accounting of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and then influencing accounting information quality.

The research model includes seven independent variables, namely organizational culture, competitive pressure, employee's awareness, readiness of the information technology systems, organization's mindfulness, alignment of the organization’s strategy and top management support, which affect digital transformation in accounting. Besides, the research model proposed to examine the relationship between digital transformation in accounting and accounting information quality. The paper uses a survey (with 253 respondents) and applies exploratory factor and regression analysis to examine Vietnamese SMEs.

This paper aims to examine the antecedents of the digital transformation in accounting and its positive impact on the accounting information quality. The research results highlight three factors: the organization's mindfulness, alignment of the organization’s strategy and top management support. In the SMEs, top management may be the one, so the top management in SMEs has a strong influence on the digital transformation in accounting.

There are small sample sizes and not yet guaranteed to cover all business areas of Vietnamese SMEs. Control variables will be added to the research model to evaluate, such as firm size, operation time, sex of top management and age of top management.

The results of this paper provide practical insights into the digital transformation in accounting for business managers, researchers and other stakeholders. Vietnamese SMEs should communicate and educate employees and spend resources to improve the information technology system. It helps to improve the financial accounting quality for SMEs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine factors affecting digital transformation in accounting and the relationship between digital transformation in accounting and the financial accounting quality of SMEs in Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the gender gap in the gross value of rice yield in Vietnam.

A panel data set of 12 provinces of Vietnam from 2010 to 2014 was used, collected from the Vietnam access to resources household survey. To measure the gender gap in the gross value of rice yield, two-stage least squares and Blinder – Oaxaca decomposition methods were used.

The gross value of rice productivity of male-headed households was 10.3 percent higher than that of female-headed households. The gender gap in rice productivity is caused by the endowment and structural effects; the endowment effect explained 53 percent of the gender gap in rice productivity and the structural effect 42 percent.

In order to reduce the gender gap and improve the gross value of rice yield, the following policies are suggested: female education and access to institutional services (extension and credit) should be improved and future research is needed to determine the reasons for gender discrimination in the agricultural production system.

The findings suggest that the difference in the gross value of rice yield between male- and female-headed households were mainly caused by endowments and returns from those endowments.

This study aims to investigate the impact of several constructs on young customers’ consumption of solar energy appliances in an emerging market by extending the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

This study collected primary data from 885 young customers in an emerging market, that is, Vietnam. Subsequently, this study used partial least squares structural equation modeling to investigate the relationships between examined variables.

The results indicated that personal innovativeness, environmental knowledge and renewable energy knowledge significantly improved attitudes toward solar energy appliances. In addition, purchasing intention is promoted by subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. Contradictorily, the perceived functional risk is a significant barrier to purchasing intention. It also negatively moderates two associations: attitude and purchasing intention, attitude and positive word-of-mouth. Despite being proven to influence word-of-mouth positively, attitude has no significant impact on purchasing intention.

These findings suggested several implications for enterprises, technology providers and policymakers to develop renewable energy appliance consumption.